Zeno: The robot based on Lord of the Rings AI

Hanson Robotics is showing off a pretty innovative, if rather scary, robot toy at the CeBIT trade show. Zeno is based on character technology from New Zealand's Massive Software, which also won an academy award for the software it developed for the Lord of the Rings movies.

Zeno can see faces and make eye contact, and learn your face and how to call you by name. It has a camera in one of its eyes and on-board speech recognition. It is also wirelessly connected to the network so it can take advantage of what the makers claim are the best speech-recognition algorithms in the world.